We've been seeing quite a bit of Jimmy and Karlie, friends of Callum's, who are travelling around Australia too. They'd asked us if we were keen to go camping at Quondong for the night but, as we'd already arranged to cook a meal for all the gang out here where we are staying (Matt, Terry, Sylvia and her girls Izzy and Evelyn as well as Rose and Bert) that night, we decided to just head up for a day trip the following day.

Quondong is only about a half hour drive from here. It's a popular bush/beach camping site among free campers and grey nomads alike, having a nice enough beach and, supposedly, some good fishing. Karlie and Jimmy have a little 3.1 m tinnie, so we were keen to take it out and put a few lines in. But, we soon realised that we had no bait between us! No fear - plenty of hermit crabs here! We wandered the beach collecting a few dozen hermit crabs, and then braved the sea in the tiny tinnie. It was my job to unshell the poor little critters and bait the hooks with the squirming crustaceans! We were sure that blue bone would like hermit crabs, but it was pretty uneventful fishing. With no sounder and no real bait (other than those poor little hermit crabs) or burly we thought we were destined to leave empty handed. And I was starting to feel quite seasick as the swell was reasonably big. We were changing spots every 10 minutes or so because we hadn't had a decent bite between us. Finally we thought we'd have one last crack and after baiting our hooks for the final time, we decided to take our chances as use the last few hermit crabs as burly, crushing the poor little blighters up and burlying up. Next thing - Ryan's line is going nuts!! We had a fish!! And what a gorgeous 47 cm blue bone he was! We couldn't believe it. The hermit crabs came good in the end.

The boys took me back to shore to do some sunbaking with Karlie whilst they tried their luck trawling for some Spanish mackerel. At the point where they ventured the furthest from shore of the whole day, the engine died! With no oars and quite a swell crashing on the rocks they had a couple of moments of concern but, before long, had the boat going again and headed back to shore. So our days fishing ended with just one blue bone, but we were stoked with that! So Karlie and Jimmy came out for tea where we ate the yummy fish along with some of Jen's famous chicken pie and icecream slice left over from the previous nights cook up!